I couldn’t stop looking at the fang marks. “If you don’t do something, one of these days your dad is going to kill you.”
He didn’t even blink. “This is the way it’s always been. I ruined his life when I was born, and now he haunts mine. I killed her, so I’m responsible. I can’t leave him, can’t turn him in, and I can’t make him better. He’s my devil to bear.”
We watched each other. I didn’t know how to refute his logic or argue his mother’s death wasn’t his fault, or even tell him I understood, that my own father, though practically an angel in this town, was mine to bear, too. But Ever’s body chose a path for us. Suddenly, he winced.
“What’s wrong?”
“Just—the pain again.” He gritted his teeth, eyes squeezed shut. “Do you have your pills with you?”
I felt caught. I didn’t speak, unsure what to say.
He bared his teeth. “It hurts.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But only because my parents told me to keep them on me.” It was a bad lie and I was prepared to keep digging the hole, but he shook his head.
“I don’t care right now, Ruth. Please, just give me one. I need this pain to stop.”
There was no choice after that. I gave Ever one of the pills whose name I still didn’t know, pulled out of the small hidden compartment in my bag, and he settled back in my lap and closed his eyes. Over time I watched his breathing even out, his face relaxing into something close to dreamy.
“We’ll talk about the pills later,” he murmured, eyes closed. “Don’t think I don’t have words for you.”
Is this what I looked like when I took them—this slow untethering? As Everett floated away from me, I vowed to never take another pill again. Now that I knew he needed taking care of, escaping wasn’t a luxury I could afford.
He shifted in my lap, revealing the fang marks again. I stared at them and pictured his father as a giant snake, rearing back against the coffee table and striking lightning fast. The poison from his bite eating its way through Ever’s veins.
I bent and put my lips against the wound—only a gentle pressure, nearly a kiss. He tasted like salt and iron, like the minerals in sea water, sand that would harden into rocks and last for eons. That’s what I wanted for him: permanence, solidity, the ability to outlast. I kissed the wish into his wound.
His fingers lifted weakly to brush the hair from my face. I looked up to meet his eyes. I could feel his blood drying around my lips, smeared and sticky. I must’ve looked like some sort of beast. But Ever was arrested, his eyes slowly tracking over my face. A small smile curved his lips. It lingered there until he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
I sat holding him for hours in the cold, not even afraid of Mr. Duncan coming home. In fact, I could think of nothing but Mr. Duncan. I imagined pushing him in front of a car. Beating him while he screamed. Chopping him into pieces and feeding him to the swamp. In that miserable house, with Ever’s blood ringing my mouth, I felt an urge for violence the likes of which I’d felt only that day with Renard. Hatred grew in my heart until I burned to do for Ever what he’d done for me—my desire to protect him so intense that in those hours, guarding his broken body, the only words I had for it wereholy passion.
If Ever had opened his eyes and asked me to do anything then, I would’ve done it. Anything he asked, I would’ve been capable of.
Like some sort of beast, surely.
19
NOW
“There he is.” Everett points, and my eyes skim the twin scars on his arm, perfect circles like a snakebite, before they find what he’s pointing at. I press my face closer to the window of the Blue Moon bar.
“The one sitting by himself at the end?” The man in question has long, oily hair in need of a wash and a dark beard so long it brushes his chest. He’s bent over a tumbler at the farthest end of Remy’s bar, looking like he wished he could fall inside the glass.
“Yep.” Ever’s expression hardens. “Good old Earl Hebert. He had a lot in common with my father.” He turns from the window. “Come on. It’s safe to go.”
But I can’t look away from Earl. “Are you sure we’ll have enough time?”
Ever tugs me. “Trust me. He’ll be there all night.”
In the dreamy dusk light, the old Duncan garage looks like an abandoned relic of some long-lost time, a building you’d see in a documentary about small towns and economic ruin. Or maybe that’s just me and my aspiring anthropologist’s eye. No matter how run down and disarming it appears, I know this place is secretly insidious, a way station for dangerous men. We cruise past it in Everett’s car and park blocks away so no one will be able to recall an old black convertible parked outside.
It’s unlikely there will be anyone, though, since we’re on the outskirts of Bottom Springs in the middle of backcountry roads shielded by trees that have grown bent over the road like an archway. This remote location, so poorly chosen for a garage hoping to do swift business, is the perfect place for an illicit drop site. There were clues.
I study Ever’s face as we trek to the garage. All my life I’ve prided myself on seeing things clearer than most. Yet I’m starting to realize the depths of my myopia.
Ever gives the lock binding the garage door an experimental tug, but it doesn’t give. “Changed this lock. That’s okay.”
I crouch and squint. “Does that mean we can’t get in?”
